JulieAndJulia Tagged Articles at Cinematical

So here we have it, the summer movie season finally winding down, and maybe it's just us, but a couple of peculiar trends have cropped up since May that we thought were worth bringing to light. For starters, we've only further elaborated on Eric's early indicator that puking was 'in' this year (seriously, it's gotten to be a pretty considerable theme), and as for the rest, you can check them out after the jump. Some spoilers follow. And if there are any corrections or additions to be made, please pipe up in the comments, and do so gently.

As pleased as I am at the box office success of Quentin Tarantino's ambitious, pretty terrific Inglourious Basterds, I wonder how many of the folks who saw it this weekend knew what they were getting into. Its clever, funny marketing campaign aside, the movie is two and a half hours of mostly talking, mostly in foreign languages. Movies that fit that description do not have $37.6 million opening weekends. We should know by next weekend whether or not people were duped (and I should say that it's not clear -- the movie is plenty exciting despite, or perhaps in part because of, all the gabbing). For the moment, Inglourious Basterds, "artfully" misspelled title and all, is easily Quentin Tarantino's biggest opening.

Robert Rodriguez, Tarantino's occasional partner in crime, also had a movie opening this weekend -- the kiddie 3-D adventure Shorts. With $6.6 million, Shorts actually wound up being a personal worst for Rodriguez, who has never had a movie open in wide release to weaker numbers. (The similarly low-profile The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl did roughly twice the business.) And the non-descript, poorly reviewed Post Grad joins a growing list of late-summer total non-starters, with $2.8 million on 2000 screens.

Julie & Julia continues to perform well for Sony. Aside from holding up nicely in general, it's doing well during the workweek -- and, after three weeks, is at three times its opening weekend gross. The Ugly Truth has also acquitted itself, now having surpassed Katherine Heigl's previous effort as a leading lady, 27 Dresses.

The full top 10 after the jump.

We know that Meryl Streep can rock any role she's given, and save any movie that she graces with her legendary talent. Accents, ABBA songs, and aspics, she does it all with shocking ease. But here's something I bet you didn't know: she's an economic powerhouse. While Hollywood wrings their hands and wonders how to market "to women," and is convinced all ladies want is The Ugly Truth, Streep has been single-handedly turning everyone a profit.

The Independent calls it "The Streep Effect" and notes that she has a Midas touch not only at the box office, but for book sales and tourism. Julie and Julia has single-handledly sent Mastering the Art of French Cooking back onto bestseller lists. (Though the Independent doesn't mention it, Child's My Life in France is selling just as briskly, as is Julie Powell's Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.) There's also been a boom in French cooking classes and cookware sales as people set out to cook their way to a perky hybrid of Streep, Amy Adams, and Julia Child.

And that's only the most recent example! Mamma Mia! resulted in hundreds of couples flocking to marry on the Greek island of Skopelos, with flights up 13% after the movie's release. Lest you think that was just due to the jaw-dropping seaside scenery, a similar effect happened with Out of Africa. Kenya received 152,000 overseas visitors in 1985, a number that climbed to 176,000 in 1986.

Sometimes you need neither big-name actors nor a ginormous budget -- just a cool high concept and some nifty advertising that knows how to get the pitch across. The sci-fi-action-allegory District 9 knocked G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra off its short-lived perch with a $37 million weekend. Word-of-mouth appears to be strong, so this one has a chance to make something of itself in a market that will grow less crowded over the next few weeks. G.I. Joe fell just under 60%, which was as expected; it's roughly at $100 million after two weeks.

The weekend's other high-profile newcomer was The Time Traveler's Wife, which grossed $19 million, beating out the last time-traveling romance to hit theaters, the Keanu Reeves/Sandra Bullock weepie The Lake House. (That one opened to $13 million but held up well thereafter). Then there were a few relative dumps: Jeremy Piven's The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard landed in 6th place with $5.4 million; Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo wound up in 9th place with $3.5 million (about par for the course for a US Miyazaki release); and the pretty damn good Bandslam turned into one of the year's biggest flops, grossing $2.3 million on over $2000 screens. Figures that the rare attempt to appeal to the Disney Channel demographic without force-feeding it Disney Channel garbage does absolutely no business.

Among non-G.I. Joe holdovers, Julie & Julia did reasonably well, which makes sense given the extent to which it's targeting older audiences not likely to run out to the theater on opening weekend. And Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, creeping toward $300 million domestic, is now assured second place in the franchise.

The full top 13 (!) after the jump.

"Decent," at least, is the watchword for G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra, whose $56 million opening is roughly half of Transformers 2's first weekend gross. I fear that the movie may follow in the footsteps of Watchmen, which opened to $55 million and ended up with not even twice that much when it left domestic theaters. I do think Paramount deserves credit for actually opening a film that the media, for somewhat mysterious reasons, did its best to bury with manufactured bad buzz. It's really not a bad number, and foreign box office should be strong with this one. A year ago I would have expected G.I. Joe to be more of a summer standout.

The $20 million on Julie & Julia seems a little low to me. I expected at least Devil Wears Prada numbers, but I guess this one skewed a little older. Hopefully that will also translate to legs for the well-reviewed film, though Mamma Mia!-style longevity seems unlikely. The clever A Perfect Getaway did mediocre business, as expected, grossing just under $6 million with no real marketing hook. I'll pick this one as my obligatory plug of the week: fans of thoughtful, off-kilter genre films should give it a shot.

They don't make double bills like they used to. I got in on the tail end of the double feature, which was a routine practice at second-run theaters until (at least) the early 80s. As a child my parents only took me to see one or two movies per year, so when I got to my teens and realized I could see two movies for the price of one, I became an addict (my all-time favorite double bill: Excalibur and The Howling). Nowadays you have to create your own double feature, and be willing to pay separate admission fees for each movie. Add in the cost of concessions, which is hard to avoid if you're at a theater for more than four hours, and the price can get out of hand.

Multiplexes don't make it easy to watch movies back-to-back, either, staggering their showtimes to maximize the number of screenings per day, accommodate the sharing of film prints in more than one auditorium, and so forth. All that is understandable from their standpoint, and doesn't present a problem if you're only seeing one movie at a time. But when I'm trying to catch up with several releases that I've missed, it gets to be a big challenge. Let me give you an example.

To varying degrees, I wanted to see all three movies that opened in wide release on Friday (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Julie & Julia, and A Perfect Getaway), ideally one after the one at the first available opportunity, which, for me, was during the day on Saturday.

Movies with food-related themes at their core have always appealed to me: I like eating, I like watching movies, why not combine the two? Julie & Julia does so quite deftly, resulting in a lighthearted comedy that's very easy to like. And these days, a movie with intelligent humor and masterful comic performances is hard to find, so that should be enough to satisfy me. And it very nearly was, although I didn't feel quite appeased afterwards.

Nora Ephron directed the comedy, adapting two stories and squashing them together: Julie Powell cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 2002 as detailed on her blog and in her book Julie and Julia; and Julia Child going from bored housewife in Paris to cookbook co-author, as detailed in the book My Life in France.

It's all about combat at the cinema this weekend: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (live action toys vs. bad guys, studio vs. critics, movie vs. our critic), Julie & Julia (legendary female chef vs. chauvinistic men, blogger vs. cookbook), A Perfect Getaway (lovers vs. psychopaths, logic vs. thrills). Personally, I haven't seen any of those yet, but I'm hoping they'll exceed my expectations for entertainment. In the meantime, in the spirit of combat, Topless Robot presents their picks for "The 7 Most Implausible Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vehicles."

Think about the possibilities. What if you could head into battle behind the wheel of a tank that launches pizzas at the enemy? What if you could vanquish the villains by tossing them into the Flushomatic Slime Pit (a self-described "high tech toilet bowl")? Coolest of all: what if you could stealthily, yet gracefully, silently sail over enemy lines, thanks to the Ninja Turtle Blimp?

Sure, G.I. Joe has all the latest, futuristic geegaws and gadgets, and Julie & Julia has its kitchen utensils, and A Perfect Getaway has its kisses and hand weapons, but if I could stride into battle atop a "Thrashin', Bad Boy Bashin' Skateboard" (AKA Cheapskate Motorized Skateboard), I think the fight would be over before it even began. You can check out all seven implausible combat vehicles at Topless Robot. Feel free to let us know: what are your picks for the most implausible combat vehicles -- from real life, movies, cartoons, or toy shelves?

Sometimes being a journalist is a pretty sweet gig -- literally. Bear in mind that before the folks at Sony filled the bellies of a handful of film and foodie writers, I had already written about Julie and Julia for another publication in anticipation of a strong movie written and directed by one of Hollywood's funniest and smartest rom-com directors, Nora Ephron, starring two formidable talents, Amy Adams and Meryl Streep.

Julie and Julia is two parallel stories about blogger-turned-memoirist Julie Powell and her hero Julia Child. Powell, an NYC writer fed up with her day job and yearning for a way to get back to her creative writing roots, starts The Julie/Julia Project, a blog chronicling her adventures cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's classic cook book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Streep transmogrifies into Julia Child for her half of the story, which follows her transformation from a French foodie in Paris to chef and author as detailed in her bio My Life in France, which she co-wrote with Alex Prud'homme.

The event I attended included cooking demos by chefs from Le Cordon Bleu and Julie Powell, juicy details from food stylist Susan Bode, and a roundtable with Ephron and Powell. And food. Let's not forget the food. Questions and answers from Nora and Julie, plus an exclusive photo from the movie, after the jump.

"I can write a blog. I have thoughts!"

The first trailer for this summer's Julie and Julia has just arrived online (courtesy of our friends at Moviefone), and the thing simply looks sweeter than a piece of pie. With this film, writer-director Nora Ephron brings us two adaptations for the price of one: Julie Powell's Julie & Julia and My Life in France, by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homm. Amy Adams plays Powell, a struggling cubicle worker looking for purpose in life, while Meryl Streep plays legendary chef Julia Child who, though separated from Powell by time and space, is going through a similar crisis in her life. The film, Julie and Julia, then intertwines the lives of these two women as they embark on a journey of self-discovery ... and lots of tasty eats. Remind me not to go into this one on an empty stomach.

I happen to think this looks delightful, funny and more charming than anything arriving in theaters this summer. Could Meryl Streep land another award nod for this role, or is that a stretch? What do you think? Despite the fact that people will constantly fudge the title ("Is it Julia and Julia? Julia and Julie? Julie's Julia?) -- do you think this one has the potential to keep you entertained for a couple of hours? Check out the trailer below; Julie and Julia hits theaters on August 7.